Newsroom

Terry Allen inhabits his art

By Brad Buchholz

As a child, Terry Allen hid out in movie theaters. He knew every one of ’em in Lubbock in the 1950s: the Clifton, the Lindsey, the State, the Lyric, the Plaza. They were houses of refuge, safe havens where a boy on a bike could “disappear” from the flashes of alcohol-fueled turbulence at home.

“I hid in all of ’em. I’d go to movie after movie after movie,” says Allen, one of the great artists and songwriters of the American Southwest. “Sometimes my folks would call the cops; they didn’t know what had happened to me. But (in time), they kind of figured it out."